Provenances of Beauty

How do we see and understand the beauty hidden all around us--especially when both our definitions of beauty and the world itself are constantly shifting? The Foundry Theater's new performance piece, "Provenance of Beauty," takes audience members on a bus tour of the South Bronx to explore this question. During the 90-minute "tour," narrated by three voices (two recorded, one live), participants are treated to a personal, political, and often hidden history of that most downtrodden of New York City's five boroughs, the Bronx.

Did you know the Bronx was NOT named for a Dutch farmer, but rather for a Swede? Did you know that in Hunt's Point a prison barge; a water treatment plant; and a fertilizer manufacturer hold sway, shoulder to shoulder, over most of the waterfront? That in the late 1970s, the South Bronx burned at a rate of more than 10 city blocks per day for more than four years? That the "eminent" master planner Robert Moses constructed tens of thousands of low-income housing units in tall towers in the Bronx--consolidating and isolating those in poverty in ways that would forever mark this neighborhood; while simultaneously displacing more than 1500 families when building the Cross Bronx Expressway?

What the "Provenance of Beauty" shows most critically is the constant change that all of our communities undergo, and the tidal and often seemingly uncontrollable powers behind such changes. When a blighted waterfront is turned into park, are there losers as well as winners? When an abandoned piano factory is turned into high priced condos, how is a neighborhood and its population morphed? How does our particular aesthetic of what is "beautiful" or something we are able to see effect our community development and planning decisions? How do our aesthetics affect those living in poverty? And ultimately, what are the full ramifications from the process we know today as "gentification:" happening not only in the South Bronx but in many of our small, traditional, and rural communities as well? Who ultimately decides what is "beautiful"? Who wins, who loses?